The Martian

What a fun book! Science fiction that doesn't feel too dumb, and lots of fun problem solving. The narrative style bugged me at first but I really warmed to it as the book went on. Can't wait to see the film.

Edit: saw the film, not as good as the book. The movie doesn't capture the fun science in the first half, perhaps monitoring gas concentrations doesn't make for good cinema. The rescue scene at the end was great though.

Edit 2: needed a delicious snack, so I re-read the book. Finished in like three days. So much fun to read! It really is a perfect book in so many ways. Not the perfect book, it's missing so many things in its focus on one person's diary-style story. But for that it's really fantastic. There's a lot of complex writing going on here too. The overriding castaway survival story, of course. But then the bits of humor and other characterization that flesh Watney out as a character. And this time I noticed how many other characters there really are in the book. The relationships between the folks in Mission Control, the rest of Watney's crew, there's more there than I initially gave the book credit for.

We should all aspire to such a successful self published first novel.